He started working for the city in the 1950s under Mayor M.E. Sensenbrenner after flying B-17s for the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II and earning his engineering degree from the University of Illinois.

He had just started the job when drivers kept crashing on an S-curve on E. 17th Ave. where the road approached Port Columbus.

"I started looking at the accident history, and I said, 'Let's put down a big, wide white line,'" he said in an interview in 2000. "It did wonders. It reduced accidents."

Later, while working for the state highway department, he conducted the studies that would persuade the Federal Highway Administration to require edge lines on all U.S. highways. He returned to the city in 1965 when Sensenbrenner returned to the mayor's office.

When Musick retired, former Mayor Dana G. "Buck" Rinehart praised him for working out a way to move 90,000 people in and out of Ohio State University football games. "That's a Jim Musick design," Rinehart said.

Musick also helped Columbus get federal money for a computerized traffic-control system at the height of the Cold War. "We took advantage of the fear of the Russians sending over space weapons and everybody having to evacuate," he said in 2000.

Throughout his career and after his retirement, he cared for his daughter, Marlise, who is disabled, and his wife, Margaret, who had suffered a stroke, said daughter Linda Evans.

"He taught us to keep positive attitudes and to do the best you could do," she said yesterday.

Evans and her twin sister, Claudia Riley, remembered that Musick would take the whole family -- Margaret, their three daughters and three sons -- to Indiana with him for traffic engineering conventions. They'd all stay together at a cabin during the convention.

Even after advancing dementia led him to move to the Laurels of Worthington, he kept a positive attitude, family friend Claudia Parkinson said.

"He still remained the happy, smiling Jim we all knew," she said.

Musick had requested that there be no funeral, but his family will receive visitors from 6 to 8 p.m. on Friday at Rutherford-Corbin Funeral Home, 515 N. High St., Worthington.